


Come As You’re Not

by mimosaeyes, projectml



Series: Project: Bug-A-Boo [5]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-09-15 13:48:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9237731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimosaeyes/pseuds/mimosaeyes, https://archiveofourown.org/users/projectml/pseuds/projectml
Summary: “Oh, no. Are you guys cultists? How did I end up as part of a cult on Halloween night?”“We’re not cultists,” Nino assured her, nevertheless giving her an open path to the door if she wanted to run out and continue waiting in the hallway. At the same time, Adrien reflexively corrected, “It’s called a coventry!”





	

Adrien and Nino led pretty average lives, and they shared a relatively sparse apartment. There were a few remarkable exceptions to both these statements.

For one thing, in the living room there was a snazzy hi-fi system occupying a good third of their table space. It had been Adrien’s birthday present for Nino, disguised as a necessary purchase for his own witchcrafting needs. “I’m trusting you to recommend me something top-of-the-line,” Adrien had said, clapping his best friend on the shoulder for good measure. He didn’t want his friend to compromise on his preference for fear that it was too extravagant. “Surround sound, you know? The ritual might not work if there isn’t, um… an aural bubble! For the magic to, um, focalise in.”

Luckily, Nino had been too engrossed in gazing covetously around the electronics store to notice Adrien’s lying stutter.

Incidentally, yes: another thing that made their lives rather extraordinary was that Adrien was a witch. Not that Adrien thought this particularly worth mentioning. In fact, what Adrien tended to think remarkable was that he had such an endearingly dedicated audiophile for a friend.

Nino, in turn, thought it crazy cool and bordering on ridiculous that he had an _actual witch_ for a friend. “Dude, is that why you have a black cat?! Like, a witch’s familiar?!” were his exact words — uttered not when he first discovered Adrien’s secret, but about a week later when the epiphany hit him in the middle of the night, and he burst unceremoniously into Adrien’s bedroom.

Plagg had jumped about a foot in the air, landed claws-first on Adrien, and then proceeded to glare at Nino with a sulky intelligence that unhelpfully contradicted Adrien’s sleepy assurances that Plagg was _just a cat, albeit a rather self-important one_. _And really, Nino, don’t you have a gig tomorrow? Why are you even awake_?

Over the days that followed, Nino’s questions oscillated between trivial and solemn, but managed to be uniformly mortifying.

“So can I see your wand?” he asked one day without warning while Adrien was comparing muesli brands in the cereal aisle, and next to them, an elderly lady’s eyebrows shot up to hide under her wig. Before his brain could catch up to what his reply sounded like, Adrien had muttered, “I don’t have a wand.” To her credit, she chose her cornflakes unflinchingly and even gave Adrien a grandmotherly sort of smile before walking away.

On another occasion, Nino had returned to their apartment and slumped onto the couch, next to where Adrien was reading placidly about basketball physics. Adrien glanced at his friend and waited. Sure enough, after flailing his arms about in the air a bit, Nino said, “Are love potions a thing? They’re never a thing in the movies, but man, it’s hopeless. I’m hopeless.”

“Alya?” Adrien asked mildly, and had his confirmation in the groan that Nino emitted. He patted the lovestruck boy’s head. Philtres were indeed a thing, but their efficacy was debatable — and more to the point, Adrien had a feeling there was no need to resort to such measures in this case.

He sometimes had these hunches, which varied from a sharp tug in his gut to a more mellow throb of certainty. It was Nino who noticed how unerringly accurate Adrien’s feelings were. They weren’t something he could control — he couldn’t tell you if it was going to rain and you were going to need your umbrella, for instance — but for Nino that added rather than detracted from the awe they inspired. They might be just chilling together in the evening and Adrien would pause the game suddenly, set aside his console, and announce, “You should call your dad.” And when Nino did, his dad would have just had a stressful day at work that he needed to rant about to someone. Nino would snark about the aggravating boss or coworker in question, and his dad would hang up restored to trademark Lahiffe lightheartedness.

When he came back to the living room, Adrien would have a faraway look in his eyes, and would take a while to snap out of it. So it seemed to Nino like there were always two sides to his friend: the incorrigible lover of puns who just so happened to have a store of herbs and candles and such tucked away in the bottom of his cabinet, and the uncanny being who was wise and knowledgeable and subtly connected to all the magic that was hidden in the world.

This unknowable side of his friend was largely what prompted Nino’s most recent question. Throughout September and October, as Halloween decorations and costumes began appearing on the shelves of certain stores, Nino in observing him grew pensive and the tiniest bit apprehensive. Mysterious parcels ordered online started arriving at their apartment. Once, a pigeon delivered a whole peacock feather, larger than its own body, by dropping it on their fire escape and pecking at the window until Nino woke from his nap and blinked stupidly at it. He had had to collect it, too, since Adrien was allergic to feathers.

Finally, while poking at their cooking spaghetti one night, he blurted out, “Hey… You’re not gonna, uh, go dark side on me or anything, are you?”

Adrien had paused from where he was casually borrowing some rosemary out of his spell supplies for the bolognese sauce, and raised an eyebrow at his friend. “Dude, what?”

Nino rushed to explain, vaguely pushing aside the possibly legitimate fear that Adrien could turn him into a toad for his imputation. “I mean, it always happens to sorcerers in the movies. They want to do some super complex spell and need more power, and, well… you’ve been pulling together some really weird herbs and whatnot recently. I should know, I sign for them sometimes.”

Mouth hanging slightly ajar in surprise, Adrien blinked. He should have realised what his usual Halloween routine would look like to someone on the outside seeing it for the first time. “Oh dude, no. It’s just Halloween, so I get to see my mum. Plus this year is special, she said.”

“Your mum?” Nino’s face said what he couldn’t within the bounds of tact. From the way Adrien talked about her, he’d always assumed she was dead. “As in, she’s coming by the apartment?”

Adrien hummed, looking down again and continuing to chop up his rosemary. “In a manner of speaking,” he hedged.

Nino narrowed his eyes suspiciously at his friend, but some deep seated self-preservation instinct prevented him from asking for specifics. “Well I hope she can find her way, ’cause this place is pretty remote.” Their apartment was buried deep in the Parisian suburbs, and was only accessible by walking through a labyrinthine series of little lanes.

He looked askance, out the window into the evening light, and when he turned back, Adrien was miraculously holding their dinner, steaming and yummy on two plates. Sometimes Nino wondered if Adrien secretly cheated on housework with magic. If so, their chores schedule was in need of some revising.

Halfway through the meal, Adrien nodded his head in the general direction of the hi-fi system and casually remarked, “Aural bubble. She’ll find her way.”

Nino very nearly did a spit-take.

* * *

It was Halloween night at last. Humming a series of notes that could almost be a melody, Adrien fiddled with the hi-fi system, upping the volume to the maximum it could go to without the sound becoming a nuisance to their next-door neighbours. Nino emerged from his own bedroom with festive pumpkin stickers decorating the trusty old pair of headphones that he generally wore around his neck, and came over to peer skeptically at the proceedings.

“I don’t generally associate Queen with witchcraft,” he remarked casually. “Although I’m digging the robes. Very _mystical_.”

Adrien continued to hum his series of notes that was almost a melody, but drifted a couple steps sideways, allowing space for his friend at the kitchen table.

Instead of coming over, though, Nino swept his gaze over the apartment. “Dude, should I clean up around here? Is your mum, like, a neat freak or anything?”

An interesting question, seeing as Adrien hadn’t actually been in his mother’s physical presence in years. It wasn’t quite hypocritical for an ethereal manifestation from a neighbouring plane of existence to nag her son about housekeeping, but it was rather difficult to relate. Corporeality is something you lose touch with after a while, really.

So Adrien merely shrugged in response, feeling as he did the beginnings of that out-of-body dissociation that was always a telltale sign of his powers activating spontaneously. This time it came with a stab of apprehension. Having Nino around change things, his gut feeling told him. There were balancing scales and cogs and tiny shifts that transmitted through the arcane pathways by which magic flowed.

And there was… he didn’t have a word for it, something like a locus maybe, in the vicinity. Like a warp of the fabric, with an almost gravitational pull…

“I need to check something,” he said, or his mouth did. He was somewhere else really, drifting toward whatever it was that he was feeling.

“Everything cool?” Nino asked, but as though from far away. Adrien went to the front door, opened it, and stuck his head out into the corridor.

He looked left. Nothing but one of Manon’s small dolls, sitting in the basket of her tricycle, which had been spruced with orange and black glitter for the festive season. She would ask for the toy before bed, and her mother would be harried about finding it.

He looked right. Sitting in the corridor, slumped dejectedly against the wall, was what appeared to be a leprechaun.

Not the glitzy, commercial understanding of a leprechaun, mind. No, this looked to be the real thing, as Adrien knew because of what his mother had told him about leprechauns: green clothes, sure, but in earthy tones instead of glamorous fluorescence. Like it had tunneled up to get here, maybe. He couldn’t see its face, but leprechauns weren’t known to just sit around where anyone might be able to target them for their pot of gold.

“Hey, are you okay?” Adrien called.

He slipped out into the corridor, leaving Nino in their living room; the other boy shrugged and put on the soundtrack to Wicked. (It seemed appropriate, but Plagg gave him a condescending look that prompted an indignant, “What?!”)

As a fictional witch sang about defying gravity, Adrien padded along the corridor toward the leprechaun. He was worried it would disappear, using what little strength it had left to magic itself to privacy, and so approached slowly, tugging the pendant his mother had left him out from under his shirt as he did. Some magical creatures recognised it and were put at ease. He pulled it gently off from around his neck and wrapped the chain around his wrist several times, keeping the brooch itself against his open palm — open, hiding nothing. Leprechauns were hardly trusting.

This one appeared to be… crying, actually. Sniffing quietly and rubbing its nose every so often.

Adrien unconsciously concealed the pendant again. “Are you okay?” he repeated, ducking his head to try catch a glimpse of the leprechaun’s face.

The leprechaun looked up, and oops, it wasn’t a leprechaun after all. She was human, a young woman in fact, with bright blue eyes ringed with kohl, instead of the mismatched yellow-and-green eyes of a real leprechaun. Her lip was trembling as though threatening to cry, and he did a double-take at what looked like stitches running down one side of her face before he realised it was just a hyper-realistic makeup job.

But instead of a sob, what came out of her mouth was, “If she sent you to mortify me some more, you’ll want to get out of here. I’m— I’m not some pushover, I just—” she sniffed again and a fat tear rolled down her cheek, “—keep crying and I don’t know why!”

The last few words came out in a strangled yelp of frustration. There was a steely edge in that voice that made Adrien think it didn’t seem all that likely that she was the type to make a mountain out of a molehill.

He was still kind of floaty and distant, but coming closer to her, he felt himself settle back into his body. So Adrien did what any intuitive witch would do coming across a leprechaun who was not actually a leprechaun in their hallway on Halloween night: he sat down, leaning against the wall at a respectful distance from her.

“What are you doing?” she said, narrowing her eyes at him suspiciously and inadvertently causing another teardrop to streak down her cheek.

Before he knew what he was doing, Adrien reached out and swept his thumb over it. The rest of his fingers rested lightly on her chin, but it was more brusque and matter-of-fact than tender. He didn’t actually know why he did it. “Just being neighbourly,” he answered absently, pulling away again almost as quickly and tucking away the pendant inside his voluminous sleeve.

She blinked. “Okay, first of all, that sounds like the opening line to a porno right before they start getting it on against the kitchen counter.”

He spluttered and recoiled, immediately recalled to the here and now. “ _What_ ,” Adrien said, and was about to elaborate until he realised that that single word distilled his reaction perfectly. He shut his mouth again with a nearly audible click of his teeth.

The leprechaun lady gave a flailing sort of shrug and cried a bit more. Wiping the tears casually away, she continued, “It would be a very weird, Halloween-themed porno though. A zombie leprechaun and blonde Harry Potter. Yeesh.”

He looked down at his plain, dark purple shirt and midnight blue robes. Touché. Only — “You’re supposed to be a _zombie_ leprechaun?”

The moment he said the words he wanted to retract them. She looked so hurt by their imputation. “You mean you couldn’t tell?” she exclaimed, dismayed. She tugged at her green suit. “All that tie-dyeing in soil colours for nothing. Should have just gone to roll in some dirt maybe.”

As an aside to herself, she muttered, “But then of course Chloé would have had even more fodder for mocking me, wouldn’t she?”

“Chloé?” Adrien repeated, picking up on the name. If this aspiring zombie leprechaun was talking about her in that tone of voice, the odds weren’t terrible that she was referring to the same Chloé he knew. Chloé Bourgeois, his childhood playmate and increasingly remote friend as they grew up and he started realising it wasn’t great how she mistreated everyone except those in her privileged circle.

“You’re not one of her gang, are you? I mean. Despite the weird Halloween party warlock get-up, I mean.”

It was his turn to be offended. “I’m not a warlock,” Adrien scoffed. “I’m a witch. Warlocks are… warlocks are astray. Wrong,” he emphasised, feeling as he did the inadequacy of the word to encompass the feeling it gave him in his mind.

She apologised, and wiped at the tears that followed automatically. “I thought witches had to be female.”

“Nah, it’s like, you can have male nurses?” Adrien said. The analogy had worked on Nino when the question had eventually come up. “More importantly, why are you crying?”

He didn’t say it cruelly. More… curiously, with a mild concern that didn’t send her off into another paroxysm.

Sniffing a little more, the zombie leprechaun girl began her story. “I showed up at Chloé’s Halloween party and she shut the door in my face in front of everyone.” She lifted her hand as if to mime knocking on the door, but just gestured with it instead, her wrist loose. “And she was wearing this princess dress, and saying I was still too weird to be around, like back when we were in high school together, and—”

Nervously, Adrien nudged her brown leprechaun boots with his sneakered feet (because the pointy witch shoes were never his style, really). As if her building emotion were static charge and he had grounded her, she seemed to sink back into placidity.

“—and now I’m locked out of my own apartment till my friend gets here with her spare key because I dropped my key in the dark. And a witch-boy thinks I don’t look like a zombie leprechaun after all,” she finished, giving him a side-eye tempered by the hint of a smile.

“Well, you don’t look like a zombie leprechaun because you just look like a leprechaun. A real leprechaun, that is,” Adrien said matter-of-factly. His head lolled against the wall as he turned lazily to look at her. “You’d be one of the better-looking ones.”

At the other end of the corridor, having waited patiently for a fair amount of time but growing impatient for Adrien’s return, Nino poked his head out of their front door, and raised an eyebrow in surprise at what he saw.

Adrien held her gaze. Her eyes were really quite pretty behind all that scary-looking makeup, especially when her lips broadened into a smile like they were doing now. “And how would you know what a real leprechaun looks like?” she asked, her eyelashes fluttering darkly against her cheek.

“I just know,” Adrien countered, shrugging and completely unaware that he sounded like he was paying her a flirty compliment.

“I see,” his companion replied, ducking her head shyly and completely unaware she was misunderstanding him entirely.

(Or not so entirely, really.)

Upon hearing the last few sentences of their exchange, Nino promptly facepalmed. There was not a doubt in his mind that his friend, though strangely attuned to the supernatural, was utterly clueless about socialising in general, or how strange the idea of actual witches in modern, urban times actually was to most people.

“Hey, dude, who’s your zombie leprechaun friend?” Nino called, hoping to rescue him.

“So I _do_ look like a zombie leprechaun!” she exclaimed in delight, pumping her fist in the air.

“Marinette,” Adrien said, quietly to himself.

“What was that?” Nino said.

But Marinette, as her name was apparently, was staring at him now. “How did you know—?” she started to ask, but stopped as Adrien’s eyes suddenly glazed over.

“Nino, it’s time,” he announced, his face lighting up at the thought of his mother’s annual visit, especially considering the special occasion she had hinted at during their scrying conversations. Adrien stumbled as he scrambled up from the ground, barely aware of Marinette’s steadying hand on his elbow.

“What does he mean, it’s time?” Marinette demanded of Nino, as she and Adrien moved swiftly back to his apartment. There was a note of something approaching hysteria in her voice, a kind of verbal signal that the whole night had diverged so far from the ordinary for her that she was no longer going to bother being surprised about any new developments. Nino didn’t answer her, both because he couldn’t exactly explain the situation sensibly, and because in the next moment Marinette was entering their living room and seeing the answer for herself.

As Adrien went swiftly over to the various candles and strange herbs and even some crystals laid out in specific formations on the floor and at the windowsills, Marinette said, “Oh, no. Are you guys cultists? How did I end up as part of a cult on Halloween night?”

“We’re not cultists,” Nino assured her, nevertheless giving her an open path to the door if she wanted to run out and continue waiting in the hallway. At the same time, Adrien reflexively corrected, “It’s called a coventry!”

“Coventry?” Marinette repeated wonderingly. “You’re not saying — that you’re actual, real life witches?”

“Oh no, he is. Not me,” Nino corrected. As if that made the realisation much easier to bear.

“Also my mum,” Adrien added, dashing up to Marinette and handing her a long peacock feather, as well as the pendant that had originally been around his neck. He sneezed, then rubbed his nose absently, cursing his allergy to feathers even as he felt that familiar sense of rightness and balance settle deep inside his chest cavity. Nino’s presence pulled the fabric of the world a certain way, but so did Marinette’s. Things were lining up in a way they never had in previous years, and it had to have something to do with whatever his mother had planned. “She’ll be making an appearance in a while.”

“Oh! Should I… not be here, when she comes?” Marinette asked, apparently clinging to polite manners as one convention she could follow even in the strange circumstances.

Adrien was flurrying about the room getting things ready, but paused when she spoke. “Have you stopped crying uncontrollably?” he asked, apparently on an unrelated note.

Only when he pointed it out did she notice that she actually had. “Yes,” Marinette said wonderingly, momentarily sidetracked. “But should I—”

He interrupted her by declaring, “Of course you should be here. You hold the feather.” Which struck her as an oddly deterministic thing to say by any measure, as if everything had lined up that night to ensure she would find herself here, in the apartment down the hall, so she could hold aloft a peacock feather.

Behind Adrien’s back, Marinette mouthed his words questioningly to Nino. Nino shrugged as if to say, _you get used to the weirdness_.

Whether or not either Marinette or Nino could get used to the weirdness in a timely fashion, however, it was only going to escalate. Adrien sat himself down in the centre of what was possibly a sigil and closed his eyes, smiling slightly and breathing deep and even.

They waited.

Marinette peered at the pendant in her hand. Like the pendant, it was a stylised representation of the purples, blues, and greens of peacock tails. As she held it, an image popped into her head, of what looked like a tiny sprite, with rounded limbs that looked cute, but deceptively so: although the tiny peacock-like creature was crying dramatic streams of glittery tears, in her head it seemed to hold great portent, ineffable amounts of power. Of its own accord, the word _kwami_ popped into her head, and she knew that she was picturing a kwami without even knowing what the word meant.

She blinked. How much stranger could this night get? Now she was communing with a brooch on the end of a chain. Marinette shuffled her feet on the spot as was her habit — and promptly knocked over a small bowl of what looked like dried herbs sitting on the floor. Staring at it in consternation for a long moment, she then lifted her gaze to look at Nino, aghast.

He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “That’s potpourri,” he explained. “Not part of the spell, no worries.”

Nevertheless, she decided to maintain absolute stillness now, which inadvertently helped because it kept the peacock feather still too.

And on they waited.

“Are you going to chant or something? Do an incantation?” Marinette ventured after a sizeable silence had passed.

Adrien’s brow furrowed though his eyes remained closed. “Well, some witches do,” he said slowly. “But it’s all about mental imagery, really. I like to think of it as making an old-fashioned phone call, so I have to talk to an operator who’ll put me through to my mum. It’s easiest on Halloween night. Close to All Souls Day but without all the static disruptions of commercial calls, you know?” He resumed his silent concentration.

A beat. “That kind of takes the magic out of it,” Nino commented, sounding rather deflated. “I thought there would be, like, a huge puff of smoke or something, or— ahhh!”

He had been interrupted by a loud bang accompanied by a puff of glittery smoke, tinged with blues and greens and purples. As soon as it had appeared, it began streaming cooperatively back out through the open windows. When the smoke cleared, there stood in the centre of the room the translucent image of a lady with a kindly face and blonde hair strikingly like Adrien’s.

“My beautiful boy,” were the first words Adrien’s mother said once she had finished dramatically materialising in the middle of their living room. She held her arms outstretched for Adrien to blissfully embrace her, or at least mime a hug. Without agreeing on it beforehand, Marinette and Nino both looked askance. Even they could see that the mother and son couldn’t actually make physical contact.

“Hey, mum,” Adrien said as he reluctantly pulled away, his voice thick with emotion. “It’s been a while.”

She hummed, a series of notes that were almost a melody. Nino’s ears pricked up at the familiar curl of them in the air. “Yes, we do stay apart for quite a _spell_ every year, don’t we?”

“Oh my god, that’s where he gets all his bad puns from. It’s genetic,” Nino stage-whispered in a moment of sudden clarity and bemused horror.

Now Mrs. Agreste looked over at the other two occupants of the room. “Oh, hello! You must be Adrien’s friends. I’ve heard about Nino, of course — thank you, I love Wicked and could hear the music over the connection.”

(She was in on the whole “aural bubble” white lie too, and had already joked to Adrien about how Nino might _see right through_ her.)

“And you are…?”

Marinette flushed and shuffled her feet a little. “I just live down the hall,” she squeaked, gesturing in the general direction of her locked apartment with the peacock feather.

“Oh, but you’re remarkable!” Adrien’s mother declared. “I think my kwami might have gotten to you a little by accident, earlier on. There’s been quite a disturbance in the winds tonight. But you shift the odds. Quite the lucky charm indeed, and wearing a lovely leprechaun outfit to _boot_.” She gave Marinette a wink and stepped closer to admire the tie-dye work she’d done on it.

Or rather she tried. As she stepped outside of the circle, the image of her, though solid enough for Adrien to hug, flickered dangerously, like a light bulb in a rainstorm with old and unreliable circuitry. That had never happened in previous years.

“Mum?” Adrien called worriedly. “Are you not quite all here?”

“It’s alright, Adrien,” she assured him. “I’ve got my foot in the door but it won’t open till all four sides are here. The world is more and more imbalanced these days.”

This seemed to bring the witch-boy some relief as well as food for thought, especially since Plagg chose that moment to jump up onto the dining table and nudge Adrien’s arm with his head.

“Is that—?” Marinette began to say, and Nino smugly looked at Adrien in an I-told-you-so kind of way as he told her that, no, Plagg was apparently not a witch’s familiar.

“All four sides?” Adrien directed the question at his mother, but glanced around at the other two as he did. “What do you mean?”

“Let me tell you,” the mostly manifested witch said. “Let me tell you a story.”

* * *

Long ago, magic flowed free in the cosmos. Oh, sure, there have always been witches and leprechauns and all sorts of magical creatures who could channel where and how it flowed. My kwami is just one of those creatures.

But the magic wasn’t something to be called up at will. It wasn’t a power that you could hold in your hand. It was out there, just beyond your fingertips, and to tell it what you wanted it to do, you had to communicate with it. You had to _spell it out_.

And like any language, there is a grammar to magic. When Adrien called on me just now, he made his own inroads, but he still had to follow the rules. That’s how magic makes the miraculous happen: by conventions that you use creatively.

But at some point, there came about magic _users_ instead of _shapers_. Magic needed to protect itself from the warlocks, the selfish, the tyrannical. And so it flowed into certain people, certain artefacts — entire species, sometimes. I’m almost certain, for instance, that dogs have a little magic of happiness and wonder in them. No offence to Plagg, but I wonder what cats got…

Anyway. Back on topic. Nowadays you can’t find very many people with the capacity to _wield_ magic, to be the epicentre for the miraculous to happen around. But they do tend to attract each other, which is, I believe, why you all have gathered together today.

Back in that realm I come from, there is no medium between me and the magic. I only help to regulate the winds and flow of it. But tonight I need your help.

All four of you.

* * *

Alya thought she was having a bad day when she got stuck with the late shift on Halloween night. She knew she was having a bad day when Marinette called her about what had happened at Chloé’s place and insisted she wasn’t allowed to go and beat their schoolmate up.

But getting to your best friend’s apartment to let her in with your spare key (of which you made additional copies, because you know she’s that much of an endearing klutz) and seeing dim green and blue lights spilling out of the room down the hallway — that’s a whole ‘nother ball game. Especially when you yourself feel strangely drawn to those lights.

“Alya!” Marinette greeted her when she poked her head in at the door. A spectral-looking lady next to Marinette waved at Alya, smiling serenely as though she had been expecting her to arrive the whole time.

“A-Alya!” Nino stuttered nervously, breaking out of his reverie at the sight of his crush and trying to look like he’d been doing something cooler than playing with the spilled pot pourri on the ground while listening to the ghostly figure of his best friend’s mother effectively tell him he was one of the Chosen Ones.

“Alya…” Adrien mused, nodding like it all made sense. Which it did, in a strange way, because it wasn’t like Alya hadn’t been circling their lives before, known to them all without any one person making all the connections and holding all the cards. And she had been drawing closer all night.

“Should I say my name too, or will that make me a Pokémon?” Alya teased the room in general. “What’s going on?”

“Come on in, Alya,” Mrs. Agreste said placidly, gesturing to a spot on the far side of herself so that she would be surrounded by all four teenagers. Still looking somewhat uncertain, Alya did as instructed.

A new mood settled over the room. All the irreverence and undermined expectations aside, all the jokes allowed to fall away, there remained only serenity and something like truth. She began telling her story again, and they sat and listened to her voice.

“You are the next generation of Miraculous Holders,” the witch finally told them all. “No matter who you think you were before. You have gathered here — quite poignantly on Halloween night, when so many people are dressed up and go about as things they are not.

“You have come as you’re not, to become what you are. Are you ready?”

They were.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This work was produced as part of a Project Miraculous Ladybug effort. In addition, we would like to thank the following beta readers for making the fic possible: @AdJiT


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